Earth’s poles are moving. This magnetic reversal of the North and South Pole has happened 171 times in the past 71 million years. We’re overdue a flip. It could come soon, as the North Pole is moving at around 55 kilometres per year, an increase over the 15km per year up until 1990.
100 Mind-Blowing Poles Facts
‘Sea level’ isn’t level. As the strength of the force generated by the Earth’s spin is strongest at the equator, the average sea level bulges outward there, putting it further from the centre of the Earth than at the poles. Differences in the strength of the Earth’s gravity at different points also cause variation.
At the equator, you would weigh less than if standing at one of the poles. You would weigh less on the equator than at the North or South Pole, but the difference is subtle. Your body itself won’t change, but the force of gravity will, thus reducing your weight.
Mars has north and south poles like Earth. The polar ice caps are covered in a layer of frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice).
The Moon is lemon-shaped. Despite its appearance in the night sky, our natural satellite is nowhere near round. The Moon is shaped like a lemon, with flattened poles and bulges on both the near and far sides around its equator. This strange shape is thought to have been created during interactions with Earth soon after its formation.
Earth isn’t round. While this sounds like an elaborate joke, we’re serious. Earth isn’t flat, but it’s not perfectly round either. Earth’s rotation causes the planet to bulge at the equator and flatten at the poles, while the distribution of mass on Earth (which is not perfectly uniform) causes small variations in the gravitational pull at different locations on the planet. These variations are too small to be seen in pictures of Earth from space, so they appear round to the human eye. The shape seen in the video above is not technically the shape of the planet, but its ‘geoid’, the shape of its mean sea-level surface extending around the entire globe. The map was produced using data collected from ESA’s Gravity and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) and shows the most detailed map ever created of Earth’s gravity field.
The Tibetan plateau is Earth’s ‘third pole’. The Tibetan Plateau is often referred to as the ‘third pole’ owing to the amount of freshwater it contains. With over 46,000 glaciers, the Tibetan Plateau holds the largest reserve of freshwater outside of the North and South Poles. These glaciers feed the rivers that run through the region, including the Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers, providing a vital source of water for millions of people in China and Southeast Asia. The Tibetan Plateau’s glaciers, along with other glaciers around the world, are under threat from climate change. Rising temperatures are causing the glaciers to melt at an unprecedented rate, which could have devastating consequences for the people and ecosystems that depend on them. New findings have found that values of ice lost from Himalayan glaciers from 2000 to 2020 were, on average, underestimated by 6.5%. This discovery has critical implications for predicting the demise of the region’s glaciers and for manageing critical water resources.
People weigh less if they stand at the equator than if they stand at the North or South poles.